I have been told to use palms on their hard bits and fists on their soft bits (so as not to risk breaking my knuckles). Is this useful?

There is a slight problem with this advice.

Your chance of deciding beforehand what type of their bits you are actually going to hit is not that great.
You might hit a different bit.

Just a thought...

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"Bruce Lee sucks because I slammed my nuts with nunchucks trying to do that stupid **** back in the day. I still managed to have two kids. I forgive you Bruce." - by Vorpal

As opposed to "normal" punches that never cause cuts? and when are you hitting someone and *NOT* wanting to knock them down or out either?

I posted about this in #19 and Bas Rutten is MOST CERTAINLY NOT a Red Herring. He was very good at using open hand strikes for FIVE YEARS, very effective.. He had years of punching before doing Pancrase, that's why he prefers punching.
You wanna see if open hand strikes work? Train them for a year. Hell, train them for six months. Condition your palm strikes & chops(hand&wrist) against metal shot bags or kettlebells Cestari-style. YOU WILL BE EFFECTIVE.

You can make them work - and Bas did - but he only did so to fit under a specific ruleset. Watch his self defense vids sometime. I recall him using and recommending a closed fist most of the time.

My beef with the pheonix eye stuff is that it seems like a lot of work to learn to use something that maybe could get accomplished just as easily as a fist. It seems like needless exoticism to me.

Me too. amusingly if you land a punch with the knuckle extended it'll just get pushed back into a normal fist.

You can't make people smarter. You can expose them to information, but your responsibility stops there.

As opposed to "normal" punches that never cause cuts? and when are you hitting someone and *NOT* wanting to knock them down or out either?

Oh, normal punches certainly can cause cuts, just less often than a phoenix eye.

Now as to when you wouldn't want to knock someone down or out, I'm not too sure myself. I do know however that there are specific targets that are more vulnerable to phoenix eyes than to punches, though. Ribs are a pretty good example. Except for that, I'm not a big fan of it either, but it's what my teacher advocates, and it certainly works well enough for him and for some other students.

Originally Posted by PirateJon

Me too. amusingly if you land a punch with the knuckle extended it'll just get pushed back into a normal fist.

Which is why the drawing was wrong; the knuckle should be supported by the thumb. With the thumb in the right place, there's no place for the knuckle to be pushed back to.

If there is a way to **** it up , the average person will proceed to do so with great vigor . Which wouldn't be so bad if everyone wasn't occasionally "average" .

As for the faulty pic ... I really didn't look very hard , just wanted to get the general idea out there . Thank you for the pics .

I will now began teaching Phoenix Eye Kung Fu .

“I don't mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out.”
BILL HICKS,
1961-1994

Originally Posted by Jean Paula-Satire

Never believe that the GOP and fellow bigots are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The bigots and Republicans have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past and that besides, they have already won